How do I setup an auto backup to an email address?

glenn69 · 10-06-2004, 10:00 AM

I would like to have our system at the office do an automatic backup to an email address.

ex...every night at 8pm send a particular file to an email address as a backup.

I am using debian sarge setup as a file server. I do not have an email program setup on that machine, so suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks

maroonbaboon · 10-08-2004, 07:22 AM

If it is just a text file you can set 'cron' or 'at' (see man pages, or google for tutorials) to run a command like

mail -s "my backup" whoever@wherever < my_precious_file

at specified times. If the file is binary it seems like you can do a similar thing to send it as an attachment, but you need 'mutt' instead

mutt -a my_precious_file whoever@wherever

Ref: http://mailman.u.washington.edu/pipe...er/005135.html

glenn69 · 10-08-2004, 09:18 AM

Thank You. I just needed to be pointed in the right direction.

glenn69 · 10-08-2004, 09:44 AM

I typed mail -s "m y backup" myaddress@wherever < "the name of the file"
now my screen simply displays < as the cursor. I cannot end it. I tried Ctrl+Z...nothing. What does it mean and how do i fix it.

glenn69 · 10-08-2004, 01:19 PM

I tried to send my file with mutt. It worke on the first file, however on the real backup file I was given an error that the ile was too large. The file I am trying to send is about 20MB and growing. What can I use to send it via cron?

maroonbaboon · 10-10-2004, 06:26 AM

If you tried to send a binary file with 'mail' I would not be surprised at anything that happened.

A 20Mb file is pretty big for any email attachment. I guess it could run up against all sorts of limits at various stages of the transmission process. You could try and compress it with gzip or bzip2 (slower but more effective) to get it to a more reasonable size. Or you could split it up first. Or use some other strategy altogether.

What's best probably depends on the sort of connection you have between the two machines.